Monday

July 16, 2001

postcard of girl typing from ebay

possible new name for journal or other WEB section

How is regular work like dental work? Well, I didn't have any teeth pulled. But the phrase 'it was like pulling teeth' comes to mind.

Spent the better part of the morning in the dental chair, getting numb but still feeling it a little, getting a fat tongue and then sharing my mouth with that and a plethora of instruments and getting impressions and temporaries. At the end, the dentist runs out for coffee and asks me if I want one. You pay for this misery but, theoretically, my mouth will be a bunch more comfortable at the end of the day. Not this day, but at some point in time. And my teeth will last as long as my body does. Um, yeah.

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So today I feel at loose ends. I try to work on a presentation for later in the week and absorb a bunch of e-mail. I have to get myself to a place where I can present to people where I don't appear to be reading slides but having a discussion with them. Where things they might be thinking about just appear on the screen or out of my mouth. You have to be prepared without seeming too prepared. Or so I say. On topics I'm pretty familiar with and pretty sold on, I think I'm a great presenter. Confidence does help, don't you think? But I've seen presenters who didn't lack it who were still awful. Well, maybe not awful presenters but just bad because they were inaccurate. Their stuff was wrong. But they were confident.

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I didn't eat this morning and was too sore of mouth (and slobbering from anesthetic) at lunch. So I subsisted on coffee until after 4:30. I didn't even get particularly hungry. I have available fat stores as we all know too well.

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When I work in this journal sometimes I feel like I'm just, well, just typing. It's relaxing and pleasurable somehow to do that. Other journals I read are like that but some are so darn well thought out it makes you go 'wow.' Not that someone could write like that. But every day.

It made me think that if I got tired of calling the journal The Visible Woman that I could switch it to Just Typing. This inspired a brief graphics exploration session. Or maybe I will make Just Typing a special section of the WEB page where I simply ramble on different topics. Hmm...that might be cool.

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Forrest rented Best in Breed for the evening's entertainment and we watched that and I had two gin and tonics and a couple of Advil so my jaw wouldn't hurt anymore. It hurts after a while to hold your mouth open.

The last bit made me sound like a substance abuser. Not really. Although I do occasionally worry when I find phone numbers and names written on pieces of paper around my desk and I can't imagine what they are.

We've been staying in a lot and watching movies and eating at home. I have this reclusive side--a person who could really withdraw into her own world of books, computers and cable TV. It's at war with my gregarious side who likes to give parties and communicate. When I was cleaning stuff up, I was sorting through candles and votice holders and I thought, I'm going to light a bunch of candles next time I give a party. When I was single, I would let my apartment be a pig sty for months and then clean the heck out of it. I'd look around and think, "I should give a party." With predictable results.

I was going through the newspapers while we watched TV. I started looking for the section called The Living Arts from the NY Times. Forrest looked stricken and said he took it upstairs because there was an interesting article about dance.

"That's OK. Nevermind. I was just going to work the puzzle." Perhaps I had a little accusation in my voice. A 'geez, don't I even get to look at the paper!'

Later he went upstairs and came back with the article, intially cut out, taped back into the paper's section. I felt bad about the effort.

"I was just going to work the puzzle."

I lost interest in the dance article, but read a Writers on Writing by Elmore Leonard. He gave his writing rules and declared some writers exempt from some rules.

Then I tried to work the puzzle. It's Monday so, statistically, I should be able to finish it. In fact I couldn't. Weird combos of letters appeared that came from other answers I was sure were right. Italian answers like Bel Canto, Tiramisu, Terra Cotta. I got them, but couldn't quite finish the puzzle.

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I really like things that are random. Not planned. I've mentioned in these pages how much I like the Powell's City of Books Used book shuffle. I would like the Open Pages random diary shuffle if 90 out of 100 didn't turn up a 'not found' or a diary with stale entries. Will there be electronic archaeologists one day who sift through old media looking for forgotten stuff. You bet.

Imagine it. Digging through discarded cassettes, floppies (floppy ones, too), video tape, recordable CDs for original, forgotten material. Imagine digging through the backups made of long forgotten WEB pages created by individuals. It is easy to imagine some records left somewhere of just about anything on the WEB. The world of physical ephemera and objects is much easier to date and attribute. Imagine a few years hence if someone claims to find J.D. Salinger's backups of his unpublished work. Oh, sure. It's hard to imagine old J.D. hard at work at his Mac or PC. But this will happen. Claims will be made over bits and bytes. Content creators may become collage artists. And the day may be carried, financially anyway, by those able to organize and give access to the slag pile of our creation. Although the world is hungry for content for sure.

Cleaning out closets must lead to these weird thoughts.

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After Best in Breed (why did we see so many friends and acquaintances in these comedic characters, hmm?), we saw part of Me, Myself, I.. The gal from Six Feet Under, Pamela Drury, is the lead. It's that old puzzle about 'what if?' Which reminds me of a holiday mailing we did a few years ago (when? don't know, didn't date it) where FFP and I challenged everyone to view the good things in their lives as a series of fantastic coincidences. Perhaps we should publish those stories here. Maybe we should revive that theme for this year's card.

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